“Or can we? I mean, at least circle the wagons and keep you two away from negative publicity.” Sawyer nodded, clearly calculating. “I think we need to double-down on the engagement. Lily, I think you need to move in with Noah.”
Lily’s eyes grew as big as saucers. “Move in with him. As in pack up all of my stuff and move into his condo in the Grand Legacy. You do realize this is far more than I was originally asked to do. Way more.” Her voice was reaching a pitch that would soon only be audible to dogs. “Don’t forget, I have to go meet Marcy Hannafort in a few days and plan a fake wedding.”
There was no mistaking what Lily was saying. She wanted more money. Noah knew it. “Fine. Then we up your percentage.” If ever there was a message that everything was back to being business, that was it. Part of Noah hated that it had come to this, but it was unavoidable. It was a tangled mess and Lily was not wrong. They were asking her to go well beyond the call of duty.
“Three percent?” Sawyer asked. “That seems fair to me.”
Lily took in a deep breath through her nose and nodded. “Yes. That sounds fair.”
“Great. Done.” Noah shuffled some papers on his desk, wondering what in the hell he’d just proposed and agreed to. He and his brother were buying off the woman Noah couldn’t get out of his head, all so she could move in with him. This was all kinds of wrong.
“In the meantime, we need to double our efforts into figuring out where Dad is getting his information. I read an article about a security company specializing in corporate espionage. I don’t like that word when we’re talking about our own dad, but it’s pretty much come to this.” Sawyer rapped on the door casing two times and walked away.
Painful silence hung in the air with Sawyer’s departure. Lily sat in the chair, arms crossed, her foot bobbing. Noah vacillated between staring at papers he couldn’t care less about and trying not to look at Lily’s legs. He really needed to get his act together.
“So. When do you want me to move in?” Her tone said she was resigned to this new reality. That extra 2 percent apparently made the idea tolerable.
“Whenever. Tomorrow?”
“Okay. Sounds good. I’m going to get back to work. I have a ton of emails to answer.” She rose from her chair and headed for the door.
Noah wanted to let the events of the last half hour go, but he couldn’t. “Extra work, Lily? Is that what this has been to you?”
“Excuse me?”
“I realize we’ve had some uncomfortable moments, but it’s not like you weren’t taken care of. We went to an amazing destination wedding together. And I guess more than anything, I thought we had fun in Florida.”
“We did have fun, Noah. We talked about that last night. But that still doesn’t mean that I wanted all of this other stuff to happen.”
He didn’t believe for a minute that she was so naive. “What do you want from me? You had to know what you were getting yourself into when you agreed to this in the first place.”
“Like I had a choice, sitting there in Sawyer’s office while everyone basically laid the entire future of Locke and Locke on my shoulders. Plus, I agreed to a weekend. That was it. Now we’re moving in together. This was the last thing I planned on.”
“Yeah. You and me both.”
* * *
In case the tabloids were watching, Lily moved into Noah’s brand new condo on the seventeenth floor of the Grand Legacy in broad daylight, around noon the next day. They made a show of the movers hauling her things into the building, but more than half of the boxes were empty. This was a temporary measure and Lily was, quite honestly, tired of the act.
“Is that the final load?” Noah came out of his home office as the movers marched by with more boxes.
“I think so.” Lily was doing her best to remain upbeat, but this was yet another life event she hated faking. She’d never moved in with Peter, which ultimately ended up being a blessing, but that made this a first for her, unlike getting engaged. And it put her in whisper-thin proximity to Noah, when every warning sign imaginable was going off in her head.
One of the movers had Noah sign some paperwork while the rest of them filed out of the apartment. Once he was gone, Lily was alone with the man she couldn’t resist, who held her professional future in his hands.
“I guess I should get myself set up in the guest room.”
“Sounds like a plan. I have some more work to do.” Noah went down the hall to his home office and Lily decided that distance was the best. Things were still chilly between them after the argument yesterday.